Case study: Community Chest shows how sharing is caring

Details

Staff Writer

22 November 2017

Regular donations are a challenge for charities locally and worldwide, as most individuals prefer one-off donations and supporting charities that they have a vested interest in. Community Chest, the fund-raising arm of National Council of Social Service, was among the list of charities that were impacted by this trend.

As a result, it partnered with design and communications agency XodBox to unveil a campaign titled "Share My Perspective", which aimed to raise awareness of its SHARE programme and encourage more donations. This led Community Chest to win Gold - Excellence in Integrated Marketing (Consumer) at the recent Marketing Excellence Awards 2017 in Singapore.

This post was done in conjunction with Community Chest, the fund-raising arm of National Council of Social Service, and Xodbox.

Problem

SHARE is a critical and sustainable source of donations for Community Chest, making up a third of Community Chest’s annual donations. It is currently supporting about 80 charities in Singapore, especially programmes that are less visible or relatively unknown among the public and more difficult to attract pledging and commitment of corporate outright donations.

Globally and locally, many charities with regular giving programmes are facing a downward trend in regular giving. It is increasingly challenging to get donors to commit to regular giving, as compared to one-off donations at an own-time own-target basis. This is because as donors typically prefer to choose their own causes to support at convenient junctures without regular commitment.

However, this poses challenges for a reliable and sustainable source of funds to run many critical social service programmes that require more regular streams. Furthermore, a pre-campaign survey also showed that 9% out of the 519 respondents were aware of the SHARE programme and 5% were on this monthly giving programme. The top reason for the non – contribution to SHARE was due to the lack of knowledge and awareness on SHARE.

Solution

In the past year, Community Chest has implemented a nation-wide SAO publicity campaign. This aimed to drive awareness and outreach to encourage sign-up for SHARE donations, which was well-received among the community. The publicity platforms included:

Print to online

Out of home

Below the line outreach efforts. This includes online banners on online news platforms, street banners, posters and lightboxes inside SMRT stations, single deck buses, bus stop six sheets, EDMs to corporate and donor database as well as direct pitches at corporate's townhall.

Advertorials were also included as part of the marketing mix to provide the public with first-hand information on how the programme is helping its beneficiaries. It also looks to share examples on how companies support SAO to encourage committed and sustained giving in their workplace and implement CSR activities using the SAO matching grant.

Through the campaign, Community Chest hopes that the community would be encouraged to play a part in giving back to the community on a committed and sustained basis through SHARE.

Objective

Xodbox and Community Chest came up with a campaign name - Share My Perspective. Through this concept, they sought to creatively disrupt conventions with the illusionary visual of a face looking forward and sideways at the same time. This was to create a powerful impact when people stop to take a second look and read the stories of the social service users.

This dual perspective from the same beneficiary imparts the message that, when everyone collectively comes together as a community to SHARE as One (SAO), they can help service users see their abilities and the better side of life.

Results

To date, the publicity campaign had increased the level of awareness on SHARE as evident from the number of audiences reached, number of impressions, engagements and clicks generated. This contributed to an increase of about 7% in new SHARE donations. It was also shortlisted as a finalist for two categories for the Marketing Excellence Award 2017.=

The campaign also generated about SG$144,000 of free publicity from SMRT. Mediacorp OOH bus stop shelters, Clear Channel’s double deck Buses, LTA and URA street banners were also utilised during the campaign. Additionally, it brought in more than 440 new companies on board SHARE, as of 31 March 2017.